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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I can’t think of a single game or emulator I own that didn’t have resolution options. Just… Turn it down to your own preference? Technically it won’t be quite as efficient as using a lower resolution exchange (at least not at the same brightness), but I would not expect the difference to be noticeable.

    Similar with the refresh rate too. The Deck has its own options to limit the refresh rate, plus most games and emulators have those options too.

    That’s what a higher resolution gives you: options. If I’m running a PS1 game that I’m upscaling? Heck, give me 4k 60FPA and it would probably still be a good 4 hours of battery life, which is longer than if want to hold a handheld for anyways. A more modern, but narrative-driven AAA game? Maybe I’d want a high resolution and settings, but be willing to settle for 30FPS.

    Or if I want to stream from my desktop, or PS5, or play plugged in then battery life isn’t a concern anymore. Which happens a lot. Back in 1998 it was important that my GBC didn’t use much power because AA batteries were expensive, and the AC adapter was an awkward and janky 3rd party accessory with a huge wall wart that made me replace the battery cover with one that would directly connect to the battery contacts. In 2025, I’m never more than a few feet away from a USB charger and USB-C cable.

    I really like my Deck a lot. It’s the single-best videogame-related purchase I have ever made, and one of the best purchases I’ve ever made in general. But one of my few criticisms is that a 1080p screen would be nice, just to have the option.


  • This has:

    • hall effect joysticks and triggers
    • a slightly smaller screen, but the equivalent of 1080p instead of the Deck’s 720p(technically it’s 1200 vs 800 since they are both 16:10) -the screen is 120hz, compared to 60hz for the base Deck or 90hz for the OLED -Options for 16 or 32GB of RAM, while the Deck only has 16 -storage options range from 512GB-2TB, while the Deck goes 64GB-1TB
    • this has an extra USB-C port, which is nice

    And that’s before we get to the APU side of things, where other commenters here are expecting the Neo to outperform the Deck. Hard to say for sure until we have benchmarks, but it seems reasonable that this will be more powerful in general.

    And what is the Neo missing compared to be Deck? The back buttons, which are nice on the Deck but I would not say are deal breakers. The ambient light sensor, which I didn’t even remember my Deck had until I looked at the specs just now. And apparently the Deck has 2 microphones while the Neo just has 1… Honestly I have had mine for 2 years and I wasn’t even sure it has a microphone at all. I don’t see that the Neo has capacitive sensors on the sticks, but I never find a good use for those on my Deck anyways.

    Now, this thing is not close to making me want to upgrade from my Deck. Just looking at it- the control layout is wrong. The track pads look like you will have to awkwardly stretch your thumb to reach them- similar to where the Deck has the Steam and Quick Access buttons. While I can play a ton of mouse-based games on the Deck for hours with no problem, the Neo looks like it will only be good for games where you use the mouse occasionally. Should be fine for navigating menus, launch screens, and setting up emulators, but not for playing games.

    The other question is build quality. This looks like cheaper plastic. The buttons look cheap. The grips look top shallow. I don’t know how easy this will be to upgrade or repair.

    Imo this is a reasonable product at a reasonable price. Not perfect. But it has reasonable trade-offs compared to the Deck. If it can manage to be significantly more powerful than the Deck with similar battery life, I think we have a real competition.


  • Is there a reason to use those over Steam Link?

    I have a AMD cards in all my desktops, so Moonlight is out. I could never even get Sunshine to run properly on my desktop, let alone stream.

    Steam Link just… Works. It’s an official Valve thing. There’s a ton of options to dial things in or work around weird issues, but for the defaults are usually fine. It handles non-Steam games just fine. All sorts of resolutions and refresh rates- I stream to my 4k TV in my living room, my 1080p tablet, various phones, and the Deck. My only complaint about Steam Link is that, for some bizarre reason, it’s not on the steam store. It would be a lot easier to just install it from the store in Gaming mode on the Deck, with a default controller profile. The picture is good, the latency is fine unless I’m on wi-fi and getting really far away from my router b


  • FYI- you can also stream from your laptop to the Deck. Technically you can do it on a per-game basis through Steam (which you may have already noticed), but I find it’s even better to install Steam Link as a non-Steam game, similar to what you probably did with Chiaki. As long as you have a good local network it’s great and uses way less of the Deck’s power.

    I have no idea why Valve hasn’t added Steam Link to the Steam store. That would make things so much easier, and you get way more settings and fewer bugs that way than doing the per-game streaming option.






  • I’ve been out of the loop for the past few years and just started paying attention to PC parts again recently. Was Tons Hardware always this pro-NVIDIA and anti-AMD? This is the first article I’ve seen so far that isn’t raking NVIDIA over the coals for using AI to misrepresent performance and the MSRP basically being fake.

    Meanwhile, TH here seems to be skeptical of the 9070’s performance and stock. Which is fair enough given AMD’s recent history, except that reports have been that AMD has been shipping units for months and was just trying to land on pricing before release. And the pricing that was announced seems pretty good, or at least better than what AMD has been doing the last couple generations. And AMD’s performance claims seem to match what consumer expectations for a generational improvement.




    1. They’re way overpriced for what they are, similar to the Apple model. Just charging really high prices and trying to create an aura of “premiumness” to justify it. Not the most egregious offense, but annoying

    2. The app launch. The app now takes forever to open and I often have to retry opening it around 4-6 times anytime I want to do anything. Considering these are speakers, and that often means that I want to pause, play, change the track, or change the volume. Those are all usually functions where having to wait 60-300 seconds is an unbearably long time, especially when you need to lower the volume. Worst of all, I have my living room TV going into the Line In on one of the speakers, and the entire section of the app called “Sources” where I can select that just disappears entirely ~80% of the time. So if I go to watch TV or play videogames or whatever and my wife was listening to music earlier now I’ve got to wait several minutes of reloading the app to be able to just use the direct line-in.

    They also removed the feature to play audio files that were on the controlling device. Other users have complained of other features like alarms that got removed or broken, though I didn’t use those.

    The old version of the app was not particularly great, but the replacement was a clear downgrade and made previously purchased hardware worse.

    1. A bit ago they had another controversy where you could “retire” of devices you didn’t want anymore. What did this feature do? Why, it just bricked the device and turned it into e-waste no one can ever use again! What could go wrong?

    2. More of my complaint for my specific speakers because I don’t know if they’re whole lineup is like this, but really annoying that only 1 of my 2 speakers even has a line-in, and neither of them have Bluetooth options. I’ve got to just hope everything i want to listen to is on a specific supported service, or find a way to get the audio to play on the TV if that isn’t in use.

    They were gifts from my in-laws. I was kind of skeptical about it but they weren’t too bad until the app change. I was even considering maybe getting another speaker to fill out the house before all this. But now I’m looking to get out of the ecosystem- maybe just build my own home theater speaker system for the living room and get a plain old Bluetooth speaker for the bedroom.


  • It feels as though there’s a cycle with waves of this kind of junk. Stuff that consumers really don’t want but companies are so convinced are revolutionary they try to shove it everywhere

    3D TV’s were pushed, but not that hard. Cryptocurrency had a brief moment in the sun where it looked like it might be viable. There’s smaller things like physical buttons being replaced by capacitive and eventually touch screens on everything from phones to appliances to cars (it seems Apple might be reversing that). There’s been a huge push away from digital media, but 80% of PS5’s sold have been the disc drive version and the markets for DVD’s and Blu-Rays seems to be heating up despite stores saying they are going to stop carrying them. There’s probably a lot more I can’t remember.

    Companies have been shifting away from meeting consumer demand and towards trying to shape consumer demand themselves instead. I blame the Marketing industry- with the rise of the Internet, TV, and even cheap printed materials over the past couple hundred years. It’s so easy to make a new brand that there’s no incentive to maintain a reputation anymore. Craftsman is a famous example.

    The power has shifted to investors. Announcing AI integration makes the stock price go up. We saw the same thing with crypto a few years ago- the most famous example is probably the Long Island Iced Tea Corporation changing it’s name to Long Blockchain Corporation and getting a stock price boost without actually changing their operations or products at all.

    We will buy what our oligarch overlords decide to sell us and we will be grateful to them for the privilege.



  • Amazing. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made.

    It’s rare for me to see games in my library that are not supported, although there are a few. But there is a difference between running and running well. Demanding games will get maybe an hour of battery life and the fans will be pretty loud the whole time. Some games (especially strategy games) really work better with a full keyboard and a higher resolution screen. Some games I just would not want to play on a handheld. But most of the time the games that I want to play work well.

    One trick I use to get better battery life and performance is streaming. I use Chiaki to stream from my PS4, and Steam Link (as a non-steam app lol) to stream from my desktop. It’s often worth it for the fan noise reduction alone.

    It’s even better at emulation. It’s a great machine for PS2 and GameCube games- I have the back buttons and track pads mapped to speed up, pause, slow, and rewind gameplay and to control save states. I have not dialed it in yet, but I think with some tweaking you could probably use the gyro and/or track pads to do some good Wii emulation. 3DS and DS are great too, mostly because of the track pads. Anything older emulates fine, but isn’t as impressive.

    I have gotten PS3 and Switch emulation to work, but the fans go on and the battery life goes down, so I don’t really use it for that. Plus storage is a bit tight and PS3 games are huge.

    It does feel like Valve was just a little too early. I wish the screen was 1080p.

    The 2230 SSD’s that it uses were kind of uncommon when it released. The weird size made them more expensive and they had lower capacities. I managed to get a 512GB one, but I wish I could have gotten like 2TB. It seems like that’s changing now though. Similarly, I wish microSD cards came in larger capacities. Storage just seems to get used up so fast these days.



  • And… Why is that?

    Anime can be found on tons of streaming services that don’t have comments, like Netflix.

    Anime in particular is pretty famous for having its own communities and niche spaces on the internet. If anything, Crunchyroll’s comments section seems to me like it’s unnecessarily fracturing those communities based on who watches on Crunchyroll vs other methods.

    There are costs to maintain and moderate communities. It seems to me like that’s adding a good bit of cost to Crunchyroll’s business model in exchange a vlrelatively small value provided to a small percentage of their customers. Whereas with dedicated social media platforms, the business model revolves around and only attracts individuals who highly valued that community. With a smaller community like that, it’s easier to rely on volunteer mods (like most of Lemmy) or a bit of ad revenue.